Sylvester Stallone must have been in a bad mood. The Rambo films have never been particularly cheery, but none of the first three were as bleak and despairing as this fourth entry in the franchise, where the main theme seems to be the meaninglessness of life and the finality of death. I’ll put it to you this way: if Ingmar Bergman or Woody Allen made an action film this would be the result.

Rambo is little more than a ninety-minute reel of unspeakably gruesome death shown in explicit detail. I find it hard to believe that a film where people are liquified by bullets and transformed into clouds of red mist floating on the breeze by landmines (and those are the tamer deaths, believe me) got a mere R rating. I’m not opposed to violence of this level per se, but I also recognize that pornographic violence deserves a pornographic rating, and that’s why the (little-used) NC-17 rating exists. Here is the perfect candidate. But that’s not to say I had any problem with the violence in this film. Rambo addresses the genocide in Burma - a particularly vicious and violent situation - and aims to show it realistically. And for that the film can be applauded. Just know that if you have a weak stomach, this isn’t a film for you.

Rambo finds it’s protagonist in current times, still living in Vietnam, the place where his worst memories - the ones that “turn on” his murderous instincts - were born and still thrive. Ironically, it is here where he has found peace, living along the river and catching cobras for local tourist-trap snake charming shows. As in the films that came before, Rambo’s peace is interrupted by his fellow Americans. This time it’s a church group looking to hire Rambo to bring them up the river to Burma so they can bring relief to a village recently ravaged by the Burmese military. Rambo is initially disinterested, but the good heart of a woman in the group changes his mind. Shortly after landing in Burma, the church people go missing and their pastor flies in from America to hire Rambo - this time to ferry mercenary hunters into the area to recover the missing.

I suppose you can guess how the film goes from there. Here’s a hint: lots of people blow up, lose limbs, take arrows through the head, or otherwise get dead. The second half of Rambo is basically a protracted blood and gore highlight reel, the scenarios becoming increasingly more violent as each new scene comes. If you’ve never seen a truck-mounted .50 caliber machine gun turret used at point-blank range, you will have after seeing this film. It’s messier than you might even expect.

Does the violence serve a purpose? Yes, I believe it does. It highlights the cruelty of Burma’s military, and it reminds us of the hell people like Rambo went through in our own wars. Indeed, a dream sequence flashback to Vietnam ends with Rambo’s superior Col. Troutman shouting his name, a sound which is replaced by the American pastor calling it out. It’s a blunt but effective way of drawing comparisons between present and past. Watching Rambo fall back into his old ways, where “killing is as easy as drawing breath”, the audience might stop to think that there are people in the real world like this. They may not singlehandedly level small cities, as Rambo did in the original First Blood, or kill hundreds of soldiers as he does in the sequels, but they have the killer instinct in them and can’t shake it. The deepest horror in Rambo isn’t the killings, it’s looking into Rambo’s eyes and realizing that he can’t turn it off. He wants to, but he can’t. And if the purpose of his life is to end others, will there be any tragedy in his own eventual death? I don’t think he’d think so, personally.

I suppose they could always make a fifth movie where he turns on himself. He does hate killers, after all. God knows there must have been at least one innocent in his line of fire somewhere down the line.

It occurs to me that my overall opinion of the film may not be obvious in the above, I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I have positive feelings. It’s a challenging film and I respect that. I can’t say I’d ever want to watch it again.